This Sunday, August 11 at 5 PM, I will be attending the local Charleston Chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State (AU).
The quarterly hour-and-a-half meetings are held in Gage Hall on Archdale Street. If you want more information, call me at 843-425-6601.
Americans United, established in 1947, is comprised of persons who advocate for support of the First Amendment to our nation’s Constitution, the part that guarantees freedom of or from religion, the part that forbids the legal endorsing or preferential treatment of any religion.
My observation is that there are a variety of advocates, those supportive of AU from different perspectives. The most notable, these days, seem to be those opposed to religion. These folk typically self-describe themselves across a continuum of such labels as atheist, agnostic, secular humanist, even “spiritual, but not religious.”
As militantly as anyone in the name of any religion, those I am here describing tend to be hyper-vigilant regarding any aspect in our public life–nationally, regionally or locally–that would seem to promote or be promoted by any form of religious agenda.
Thus, they stand at the extreme in opposition to so many in America today who so stridently claim that America is a so-called “Christian nation.” Not withstanding that whatever “Christian” may mean, it has been–and continues to be–expressed in such remarkably different ways. Not only throughout the world, but certainly here in the United States.
I, by contrast, am engaged in the important witness of Americans United for a different reason. It reflects that of a radical Baptist kind of Christianity as it has found expression historically.
My moral and spiritual forebearers were persecuted as a religious minority, at the hands of whatever the particular “state church,” not only in 16th and 17th century Europe and England, but also in various colonies/states in 18th century America.
In colonial Massachusetts, for example, the Baptist, Roger Williams, was exiled by the theocratic Congregationalists, thus subsequently establishing the “religious freedom” that would come to characterize Rhode Island. And such deists as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison–who would have hardly considered themselves Christians in any sense, much less a Baptist kind–supported such a religious minority from being discriminated against, even persecuted, by the “established” Anglican Church in their native Virginia.
Indeed, Jefferson’s “Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom” and Madison’s “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” were a precursor to the later First Amendment to our new nation’s Constitution, influenced as it was by such “separation of church and state” advocacy on the part of these two Virginia statesmen.
Tragically, too few Baptists in America these days–and certainly here in the South–seem to have any historical, much less theological and ethical sense of what it means to be an authentically Baptist kind of Christian.
So while there are those AUers committed to a more thorough “secularizing” of American, my insight is different. My concern is for promoting the integrity of anyone’s religion–or lack thereof. Since, if history reveals anything, anytime religion and the political process become bed fellows, as in being particularly sanctioned by one or the other, both become corrupted. For indeed there is, inherently, enough moral ambiguity in the nature of each–at least in their institutional forms–such that neither religion nor politics need any help from the other where corruption is concerned.
Moreover, freedom of religion–whatever kind it may or may not be–also implies freedom from religion. Since, ironically, the more “secular” a government , the more vital and authentic religious expression tends to be. This, the framers of our nation’s Constitution, in general–including the First Amendment, in particular–were astute enough to understand and promote.
Such is the important advocacy of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, where there is room for more than just one agenda, insight, advocacy or point of view. And that’s about as American as you can get. Not to mention–from an historic Baptist perspective at least–a remarkably Christian conviction. Or as St. Paul declares, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (II Corinthians 3: 17).
